15 phenomenal ways to stop deforestation

1. Start planting trees. That’s the sum of the domestic campaign so far. Soon, all the neighbors will be carbon copying each other.

2. Stop printing and go paperless. Whether at home or work, many of us still have that nasty, lazy habit of not learning to utilize computer files and folders properly. So instead, we print. And, you know what, many of us do this when we think others are not looking.

3. When at home, recycle as much as possible. By extension, you are continuing with your proactive exercise in diverting the demand for clearing land.

4. In the kitchen, cut down on your meat intake and eat as many vegetarian meals as possible. It’s a best practice and a healthy one on top of it too. It’s problematic and time-consuming trying to source meat products that are entirely devoid of being harvested on land that once brimmed with trees.

5. To get these things right, especially, you,re, shopping for recycled and sustainable products and your meat products, vigorously check the labels of each item you pick up. A much safer alternative and time-saving effort entail simply buying organic products instead.

6.  Palm oil is a type of edible vegetable oil that is derived from the palm fruit, grown on the African oil palm tree. According to the World Wildlife Fund, an area the equivalent size of 300 football fields of rainforest is cleared each hour to make way for palm oil production.

7. Do not use firewood to heat up your fireplaces. It takes a few hours to burn the firewood, but takes years to grow a single tree. Live in such a way that your activities cause minimum impact on the environment.

8. Encourage people to live in a way that doesn’t hurt the environment. Try to bring in more people in your community and let them know about how trees are being destroyed at an alarming rate and what steps we need to take to minimize our carbon footprint on the environment.

9. . In the process, you also need to practice what you preach, both publicly and within the confines of your home, where no-one can see you. It’s hard, and it will take time. But, getting used to the idea is important, and you’re already off to a good start.

Imagine always feeling guilty whenever you go to the supermarket, knowing well that you’ve just bought something you had no business buying anyway. That’s the positive side of our human condition. It’s good to have a guilty conscience. Let the heart speak for itself

10. Look for such organizations in your area that help restoring degraded forests. Restoration of degraded forests is a challenging task that takes decades and requires careful planning and monitoring. It supports the ecosystem’s capacity to recover perfectly and give us a new chance to start once again.

 For example, South Korea’s reforestation program has managed to nearly double the country’s forest cover from 35 to 64 percent since the 1950s. In just 50 years, a part of a - tropical rainforest in Costa Rica was successfully revived.

11. Don’t also buy products containing palm oil, the majority of which comes from recently cleared land. Palm oil production is probably one of the main causes of tropical rainforest destruction around the world today. The palm oil is found in many of the products you buy from the supermarket, and as it can be disguised in many different forms in numerous beauty products and food, it is hard to avoid them entirely.

 At least look for an alternative that carries a sustainable palm oil certification from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RS PO), where at least 95% of the palm oil is certified in sustainable practices throughout the supply chain.

12. Do not use firewood to heat up your fireplaces. It takes a few hours to burn the firewood, but takes years to grow a single tree. Live in such a way that your activities cause minimum impact on the environment.

13. On a much larger, political and/or corporate scale, it would be ideal to become a serving member or volunteer of any international and locally-focused organizations that strive for the protection of forests from deforestation and apply sustainable forestry practices.

14. Becoming the dearly beloved ecologist does not end with merely hugging a tree a day and planting a few trees every other year. You still need to become actively involved. Your research will lead you to the world’s most prominent eco-NGOs specifically focused on campaigning and working against deforestation. Also, it’s quite easy to become a member, too.

15. Take good care of your technological devices. Technological devices are probably a source of deforestation too because the production of cell phones, tablets, laptops, or other tech devices means minerals such as lithium, copper or nickel were previously extracted and more need to be available. The extraction and the chemical separation processes to get these minerals are very polluting and likely to take down existing trees for new mining sites.

 However, there’s something you can do, and that is to take good care of them until they break or stop working. When you will decide to get updated and buy a new one, make sure the old one will still be used while it’s working.